In 1980, when Mandina felt the hot breath of the tax people on his back, he tried to cover his tracks. He found Ruth Casey, the Divorcee, in Texas and asked her to sign a paper. Since she didn’t have her glasses, he read her a paper aloud saying that she had received $100,000 for her restaurant in 1969; however, the paper she signed said that she had received $200,000 for the restaurant. The judge was not impressed.
According to the judge’s summation: “Although the paper signed by Ms. Casey in 1980 stated that she had received $200,000 . . . her testimony at the trial was consistent that she only received $100,000. . . . We conclude that Ms. Casey was not completely aware of the contents of the document she signed in 1980, and in fact she only received $100,000. . . .”
In 1970, Dana Mitchell finally divorced the Heiress and vanished. Mandina tried to keep the operation going without him. In a sense, it became a family operation. His brother Jerry became president of DMI. Mandina even used his mother Margaret, a retired New York school teacher, as a front by sharing a safety-deposit box and a checking account with her.
The judge ruled that Mandina was part of a conspiracy here, but even if he weren’t, it didn’t matter “since the record clearly establishes that petitioners did have an agreement among themselves to extract money from DMI for their own benefit, and that they did so.”
After all the testimony, the government was able to track down quite a bit of the money that had found its way into the pockets of Mandina.
In determining his real income during the year he declared $17,055, the court broke it down this way:
1.
Partial proceeds of restaurant sale ($100,000) “diverted by you.”
2.
Check from Harriet Pierce ($300,000) “diverted by you.”
3.
Sale of stock in Sooner Oil ($225,000) “diverted by you.”
4.
Checks issued by DMI ($125,000) “diverted by you.”
5.
Partial proceeds of DMI checks ($98,000) “diverted by you.”
And so on. Now I understand more fully why so little of the income made by me ever got to me. Because I was always surrounded and outnumbered by men like Mandina and Traynor, people skilled in the techniques of “diverted by you.”
The judge—and later the appeals court—decided that Mandina somehow neglected to pay a “deficiency of income tax of $637,925.” There is also a fraud penalty of $318,962. When you add the interest from 1969 until today, it might add up.
Philip J. Mandina continues to practice law in Miami, Florida. Both Harriet Pierce, the Heiress, and Linda Lovelace, the Porn Star, have had a share in paying for his practice. And we’ve both learned a very valuable lesson.
When I see how much was embezzled from Harriet Pierce, I shouldn’t feel too bad. Compared to her, I’m small potatoes. The only thing that truly surprises me is that after all this, Philip Mandina has accused me of damaging his reputation.
twenty-nine
And so my royalties vanished before they reached my hands. “Diverted by” Philip J. Mandina. Though a best-selling author, I was poor again. Even while I was appearing on national shows and being written about in every leading magazine, our refrigerator was empty and our creditors were kept waiting.
But the book tour had to go on. Not just in America, but throughout the world. Maybe we hadn’t exactly
conquered
America—but at least we’d made some inroads, along with some new friends. Now we were ready to tackle the rest of the world, starting with England and then going on to Scandinavia. The thought of going to Norway and Sweden stirred up just a few hobgoblins; ever since my days with Chuck, I’d heard Scandinavia described as the porn capital of the world.
But no longer did we feel so alone, so vulnerable. We had new friends in our lives, friends like Gloria Steinem. We had Lyle Stuart, a gutsy publisher who was backing us to the hilt. Having a friend like Lyle was a new experience for me; I never believed that any man, other than my husband, would be protective of me.
Still, leaving these shores has always been, for me, a scary experience. The last time we’d been abroad was in the Philippines, the time I was fired from a film. I still remember the feeling of being in a strange hotel in a strange corner of the world without a friend to my name or a dollar in my pocket. And I’ll never forget my happiness on getting back to this country.
Our new European tour started out very much like the tours back home with the usual round of press, radio and television interviews. However, this time there was a difference, a difference that existed within myself. It had much to do with the Gloria Steinem article and the other articles that followed. I was more sure of myself, more willing to speak up and speak out.
In England I ran smack into the traditional English reserve. During my first radio interview, I was (of course) asked why I didn’t manage to escape from Chuck Traynor earlier. I must’ve been wound up because I exploded with the full answer.
“After our first day together, he began to beat me,” I said. “I literally became a prisoner of his. I was never allowed out of his sight. I wasn’t permitted to use the bathroom on my own. If I went into the bathroom, he came in with me. If he took a shower, I had to go in with him. I became totally embedded with fear. Each day was a matter of surviving, of trying to make it through that day.
“I made three spontaneous attempts at escaping and they were unsuccessful, needless to say. And I suffered a brutal beating for each attempt. And also some kind of sexual perversion for the punishment for having tried to escape.”
As I went on painting what I felt was a true picture of unqualified brutality and terror, I couldn’t help notice that my interviewer was betraying as little emotion as his microphone. So this was the famous stiff upper lip.
“What you are really saying then,” he said, in clipped tones, “is that he
propelled
you into it?”
“Well,” I said, trying to break through his reserve, “when a .45 is put to your head, you find yourself doing strange things.”
Another English reporter, Penny Perrick, took me on a tour of the SoHo sex shops. Although I’d been involved in pornography for years, I was only now getting an idea how big the business really was. Here was an entire section of London devoted to little else. Blinking neon signs saying, “Hard Porno!”, windows decorated with dildos and life-sized blow-up dolls, magazines about whipping—the whole area was a museum of everything that’s perverted.
Finally I stopped in front of a genuine oddity, an Italian grocery with a window display of drying noodles, imported cheeses and sausages, bottles of chianti. This, incidentally, was right down the street from something called the Anne Summers Sex Shop.
“If I owned this shop,” I said to the reporter, “and that opened over there, I’d put a sign right here in the window asking people to sign a petition, some statement demanding that the other store be closed down.”
Larry gave me a double-take.
“That sounds like a speech,” he said. “Anyway, honey, we know it’s never that simple.”
But the reporter told me that many others felt the same way and that they were then in the process of banning sexually offensive window displays. I was pleased I’d had the courage to say what I felt.
“All this talk about freedom”—I was too far gone to slow down now—“why should people have the freedom to offend other people? All they really need is a sign on the door. Customers looking for that kind of thing have a sixth sense. They’ll know what’s there without any big display out front. It seems to me, if it’s right there in the window, then it takes away some of
my
freedom.”
“Yeah, I
thought
it sounded like a speech,” Larry said.
As I was talking, the reporter was scribbling. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much this kind of thing offended me. Why the strong reaction? Was it because these sexual artifacts reminded me of the past? Yes—but it went beyond that. I was surrounded by the symptoms of a sickness. No, not just a sickness, an epidemic.
Standing there in SoHo, I was surrounded by ghosts. At one time I had been neck-deep—throat deep—in this world. The 8-millimeter moviemaker who wanted the actors to urinate on each other . . . the still photographer who smeared ketchup over my back and then handed another girl a whip. . . .
Flashback to—
Lenny Campagno, a.k.a. Lenny Camp. South Miami, a living room filled with boxes and crates. Newspapers on the floor, cats crawling over everything, dirty dishes piled in the sink, cat hairs in the sugar bowl, a bed surrounded by floodlights, Lenny Camp telling Chuck, “Get her undressed now, tell her to take off all her things. ”
And Chuck saying, “Okay, Useless, get undressed, we’re gonna to do some pictures here. ” And then producing another girl, Chicklet, no more than 18 years old but an old hand at this. Chicklet couldn’t understand why I was crying so much.
Lenny Camp, two cameras roped around his neck, saying, “All right, girls, why don’t we start off with a few kisserinos.” Click-click-click. Me going numb, turning into a robot, feeling nothing as some skinny naked girl kisses me on the mouth and Chuck yelling, “Wouldja at least try to make it look natural?” (Natural? What could be natural about putting my hand on another woman’s breast?)
Chicklet trying to calm me: “We’ll just go through the motions together—you’re gonna have to anyway—and then it’ll be over with and you can forget all about it. Look, when you go down on me, just fake it. . . . I won’t tell anyone.” Go down on her? Oh, God! Then Lenny Camp coming in from the other room, strapping something large onto Chicklet, a make-believe male sex organ. Then she taking on the male role, getting on top of me and putting it inside of me. Clickclick-click. A day of firsts. First still photographs. First dildo. First female sex partner. The beginning.
No. No more. Life was too short, far too short for these ghosts.
I could feel a change coming over me. I had always hated the porno world, but no longer was I going to keep my opinions to myself. Why shouldn’t I tell the world what I really felt? After all, the world was listening now. I decided not to pull any more punches, to let some of my anger—no, some of my
hatred—
come out.
thirty
The reporter from
Now
!, an English newsweekly, asked me what I
really
felt about pornography and I decided to
really
tell him: “I would like to see people who read pornography or have anything to do with it put in a mental hospital for observation so that we could find out what we have done to them.”
Whenever I said something like that—something I really felt or something that attacked someone—the pencils began to move. So be it. That’s what they really wanted and that’s the way I really felt—so why soft pedal my opinions?
The low spot of our London trip was a luncheon arranged for us at London’s Cafe Royal. I knew we were in trouble from the outset. Somehow they had neglected to tell us it was a formal affair. And Larry was dressed the way he usually dressed, which is to say he was wearing slacks, a shirt and a lumberman’s jacket.
Before we got there, they had had the cocktail hour. In fact, judging by the looks of things, they had had more than one cocktail hour. All I knew is that everyone there—and this was supposedly the crème de la crème of London’s literary establishment—was pretty well blitzed.
Beverly Hayne, feature editor of the magazine sponsoring the lunch, introduced me by retelling my story. As she told how I had been raped and beaten, her words got a reaction I’d never before seen. Most of the people in the room, most of these
literati
started giggling. At first they tried to hide their laughter but they were too blown away to do that with any success. Finally, every line she spoke got a bigger laugh than the previous one.
She tried to regain control of the meeting but it was useless. She said that Chuck Traynor had turned me into a “sex slave” and that he had used my body “as a credit card” and, for some reason, those thoughts got the biggest laughs of all.
If I had been smarter, I wouldn’t have gotten upset; I would have just gotten out. I should have realized a couple of things. Most important, these people were so drunk that news of their mother’s demise would have drawn a round of applause. Secondly, most of them hadn’t yet read the book and they were still looking, through their bleary eyes, at the
old
Linda Lovelace.
“Hey, wait a minute!” I stood up and went to the microphone before the introduction was completed. “What’s happening here? I can’t believe you people are getting a
laugh
out of this. How would you like it if it were your daughter? What if this happened to
your
wife?”
I had to shout just to be heard and did. Finally the audience quieted down a bit. At least they stopped laughing. I was talking about the most alarming pornographic statistic I know—that the youngest known victim of child pornography was only 13 months old—and that seemed to start them laughing again.
At least one person there had read
Ordeal.
He was William Hickey, a
Daily Express
reporter. Hickey was later described in the London press as “a rude and objectionable fellow” and I think that’s a splendid example of English understatement. Hickey, young and well groomed, got to his feet to ask the first and only question of the day.
“Oh, could you please tell us what happened to Rufus?” he said.
“You’d have to ask Mr. Traynor,” I snapped.
My voice had a quaver in it. Rufus was the dog that Chuck Traynor once bought for the purpose of torturing me sexually. Several times Chuck had tried to bring the dog and myself together for publisher Hugh Hefner’s delight. Rufus, needless to say, was a name that I wanted to forget.
I suddenly saw Larry get to his feet and walk over to Mr. Hickey. When they were inches apart, the reporter seemed to realize my husband was not fooling. I closed my eyes because I sensed Larry was about to knock this man out. Something had been happening to both of us. We had taken it long enough; we weren’t going to take it any more.
“Do you feel better now?” Larry was shouting. “Do you feel a lot better now? Did you know that was the worst thing she ever went through and do you feel better now that you’ve said it? Why don’t we talk about the Jews in the ovens and concentration camps of Germany, if that’s the kind of conversation you really want to have?”
“B-b-but . . .” Hickey stammered.
“Why would you want to humiliate my wife?” My husband said to a room suddenly gone deathly quiet. “Would you like to go outside where we can talk about this?”
Hickey had no intention of going outside—or anywhere else—with Larry. At this point a woman on the dais tried to intervene: “Mr. Marchiano, would you kindly take your problem outside? I wish you would settle your grievance outside.”
“Honey,” Larry shouted back, “that’s what I’m
trying
to do. I’m trying to get this dude outside.
“We’re just here to have a good time,” the woman said, apologizing to the room at large—not for Hickey’s ill-mannered question but for my husband’s entirely human reaction. “We’re here to have a good time and I must say that I’m sorry about all this.”
That was it for me. I got up to leave, but not before delivering a parting shot: “I feel sorry for all you people,” I said. Then Larry and I just marched out. To the credit of the British press, in reporting the incident, the newspapers all seemed to take my side against Hickey.
Did we over-react to the Rufus question? It was the kind of question the former Linda Lovelace would be asked all the time. But both Mr. Hickey and I were a bit surprised to learn that she had been replaced. And the new Linda Marchiano wasn’t having any of it.
Larry and I were coming into our own. By the time the story got back to the gossip columns here in the States, it was reported that Larry flattened Hickey in a brawl at a literary tea. The truth was somewhat less dramatic than that, but maybe more meaningful.
I think the two of us had developed some confidence, the confidence to stand up on our own two feet and
not
to be used or abused.
Norway and Sweden were directly ahead. There, the book was being published by small, independent companies that needed all the help my appearance could supply.
By the time we landed in Sweden, I was in a terrible mood. I hadn’t been able to sleep in days and looked it. (Larry, on the other hand, had been sleeping easily and was well rested.) I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language. Stepping from the plane and walking out into Scandinavian winter for the first time, we both realized we were inadequately dressed. Larry didn’t own an overcoat and was trying to get by with a sweater. I was wearing moccasins.
We were met at the airport by two women from the publisher’s office. One of the women showed me our schedule for the morning—three interviews over the next two hours, three interviews without a bite of food or a moment of sleep. I felt cold and tired—a combination of winter and panic. I went into my primadonna routine.
“Forget your schedules,” I announced. “I’m not doing this tour. It’s just too much and I’m too tired. I’m not staying here. Forget it, it’s all over, get me a ticket on the next plane back to the States.”
The publisher’s representatives looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, smiled at me and hustled me right along to the interviews. I’m so glad they didn’t take my outburst seriously, because this was to begin the nicest two weeks I’ve spent anywhere.
At first I had doubts. The first day there was an autograph party at a major bookstore, and, much to my chagrin, only ten people showed up. There were other people in the store but not to buy books; they were there to study me out of the corners of their eyes. This was a frightening experience, another flashback; these were the same men who
used
to follow me. I could feel their eyes searching me out from behind the shelves of books.
We finally figured out what was happening. These people hadn’t yet read any interviews or seen any reviews; the only Linda Lovelace they knew anything about was the
Deep Throat
Linda Lovelace.
Once they learned what my book was about, and what had really happened to me, a different kind of person came out. While in Sweden, I autographed 425 books in a single day—more than had been sold by a visiting Pulitzer Prize winner, or one of that country’s leading television entertainers.